Something nearly every PHP developer does is develop scripts that parse, or extract, information from text documents. There are many reasons why parsing is important, ranging from scraping information from webpages, parsing email messages, searching for specific entries in text files, or to authenticate events in a log file. And while parsing text is a common activity, there is very little instruction on how to extract desired information from a text file. This is the first of a three article series on parsing text with PHP. This installment is a quick primer on how to simplify your parsing strategy.